Eesti Keel

Oivaline! Suurepärane! Wonderful! Marvelous!

I have graduated from my first two Estonian classes, and, so far, I have come to appreciate that the Estonian language is incredibly complex. There are so many cool new sounds and fun-sounding expressions. Here are some of my favorites:

Tere õhtust!
Good evening!
Saame tuttavaks!
Let's get acquainted!
Palun, kuulake ja lugege!
Please, listen and read!
Kas on küsimusi?
Do you have questions?
(Careful with the last word. If it is said too slowly,
it can also mean "give me a kiss!")
Tõesti?
Oh, really?

For those of you who aren't language nerds, Estonian is a non-IndoEuropean language, so it's not related to Romance languages like Spanish, French, or Italian and it's not related to Germanic languages like English and German, and it's not related to Slavic languages such as Russian. Part of the Finno-Ugric family, it shares roots with Finnish and Hungarian to name a couple of its more identifiable kin (there is also Karelian, Mongolian, Mordovian, and Khanti-Mansi, Sami, for those of you curious). There are about one million people in the world that speak Estonian. Maybe I'll be number 1,000,001!

Another constantly amusing bit of Estonian (for me at least as a newcomer) is that it is hard to decipher male and female names. It seems as if I am constantly waiting in an agreed-upon spot where I am about meet someone for the first time... and I don't know whether to keep a steady watch for a woman or a man. You laugh, but maybe you should aslo try -- here's a test (answers at the bottom):

1. Saale
2. Taavi
3. Hiie
4. Koidu
5. Jüri
6. Siiri
7. Kärt
8. Viljar
9. Virve
10. Raili
11. Rain
12. Ülle

Key: 1) W, 2) M, 3) W, 4) W, 5) M, 6) W, 7) W, 8) M, 9) W, 10) W, 11) M, 12) W

Maybe some of you have already tuned out of this linguistic discussion, but I only have one more surprising element of Estonian. There are 14 cases. 14 CASES! Did you know such a thing was possible? I did not . . . and I remember thinking that Slovak was complicated. Cases mean that the nouns have inflection or they change somehow depending on their usage; we don't really do this in English, so it probably is a somewhat foreign concept for those who haven't attempted to master a case system in another language. As an illustration, I will duplicate the example given in my phrasebook for the noun "poeg," meaning son:

Case Word Meaning

Nominative poeg the son
Genetive poja of the son
Partitive poega as an object, the son
Illative pojasse into the son
Inessive pojas in the son
Elative pojast from, out of the son
Allative pojale to the son
Adessive pojal on, upon, at the son
Ablative pojalt from, off the son
Translative pojaks for, as the son
Terminative pojana as the son
Essive pojani until, up to, to the son


Uff! Needless to say, my highest hopes are only to be a bit more functional in my everyday life. It helps that nearly everyone speaks English -- AITÄH! (Thank God!)

Wikipedia information about Estonian